The 13th Juror

by John Lescroart

  “How long had you been married?”

  “Eight years.”

  Hardy had taken out his pad but mostly he was listening, waiting for a false note. Now he stopped her, realizing they’d been avoiding the main issue. “They didn’t arrest you because you had a couple of fights with your husband, Mrs. Witt. There has to be something tying you more directly to the crime or there’s no case. They tell you what that might be?”

  She was biting down on her lower lip. “It must have been the gun, but the inspector asked me about that when they found it and I told them I didn’t know anything about it.”

  “What about the gun?”

  “It was Larry’s gun . . . He was shot with his own gun. But at first they didn’t know it was our gun, it wasn’t found in the house.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We kept it in the headboard, but they found it like two weeks later. The inspector said somebody found it in a Dumpster and it had my fingerprints on it. I told him of course it had my fingerprints on it, I pick it up to dust inside the headboard every couple of weeks.”

  Hardy let his silence answer.

  She shook her head. “I’d been out jogging. We live, lived—” She made a fist and hit it on the table. “You know what I’m trying to say.”

  “You’re doing fine,” he said. “Just tell me what happened.”

  Jennifer stared at her hand, the balled-up fist. She covered it with her other hand and brought it back toward her. “The house is on Twin Peaks, you know, pretty far up. It was morning, maybe nine-thirty or ten o’clock. Larry lets me . . . I mean I usually run three times a week. When I got home there was a police car in front of the house, and the man was standing by the front door, which I remember thinking was strange because if he had knocked why wouldn’t Larry or Matt have opened it, right?”

  “Right.”

  “But he was just standing there, so I opened the gate and asked if I could help him and he said he’d gotten a call about some shots. First some yelling and then some shots.”

  “Did you have a fight that morning? You and Larry?”

  She seemed to duck again and Hardy found himself getting a little impatient with it. But her hand came back to his sleeve, tacitly asking for his indulgence. “How long had you been gone?” he asked.

  “When? Oh, an hour. I had to be back within the hour.” Seeing Hardy’s reaction, she pushed on. “Larry worried if I wasn’t home. He knew where I ran and how long it should take, so that . . . the hour thing . . . it was, like, a rule.”

  “Okay, let’s go on. The policeman is waiting at your door.”

  “So I asked him if he’d knocked and he said yes but there wasn’t any answer and I told him there had to be. I mean, I was sure Larry hadn’t left. It was the week after Christmas, his first week off since last summer. Anyway, by now I’m starting to get worried. But maybe Larry’s in the shower, or Matt is so they can’t hear or something, right? But there’s still no answer, so I take out my key and we go in and I’m calling ‘Larry’ and ‘Matt’ and I start to go upstairs, but this policeman tells me to wait and I go to the couch. Then he’s at the top of the stairs saying ‘Don’t come up, stay right there now.’ And I know. God, then I know.”

  Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. Finally she gave up the effort. She sat with her hands crossed in front of her, tears rolling off her cheeks and puddling on the table.

  2

  Hardy was not a popular man on the third floor of the Hall of Justice. The previous summer he had gotten caught in some political cross fire with Christopher Locke, his boss at the time, the District Attorney of the City and County of San Francisco. They had exchanged a rather unlawyerly bit of badinage, after which Hardy had quit, gone to the defense side and beaten the Assistant DA, who had stolen his case from him, and by extension Locke himself, in court.

  Now whenever he had occasion to walk the once familiar halls he felt crosshairs on his neck. Still, he owed it to himself and to David Freeman—and Freeman’s client if it turned out that she stayed that way—to test the waters here.

  At the end of the public hallway, he stopped at the double-glass reception window and asked for Art Drysdale, the Chief Assistant District Attorney, with whom he had always had a cordial, even friendly, relationship, although that too had been compromised by the events of the last year.

  “Is that all she told you?” Drysdale had pushed himself back from his desk and stopped juggling his baseballs, but he held three of them in one enormous hand against his cheek. “I think she left out a little tiny bit.”

  “Art, I just spent an hour talking to her. She didn’t kill her son.”

  Drysdale, more or less expecting this, nodded. “Maybe not on purpose.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means let’s say the kid got in the way.”

  “Of what?”

  “Of Mrs. Witt killing her husband.”

  Hardy turned in a half-circle. “Please . . . ”

  Leaning forward, Drysdale said, “Please yourself, Diz, this indictment is rock solid. The kid was there and died while she was committing the crime of murdering her husband. As if you didn’t know, that makes the son a Murder One, too. Just like if a bank robber shoots a guard by mistake. Sorry, but Murder One.”

  “Have you talked to her?”

  “Oh sure. Everybody gets arrested. I run upstairs and protect their civil rights till they’re processed. Then I hold their hand until bedtime and make sure they get tucked in. Give me a break, Diz.”

  Hardy knew Drysdale was right—of course there had been no reason for him to have talked to Jennifer Witt. But Hardy couldn’t let it go. “She didn’t even do it by mistake, Art.”

  Baseballs were getting juggled again, a bad sign. “That’s why there are trials, my man. Figure out what really happened.”

  “But you’ve charged her.”

  Again, reluctantly, Drysdale stopped his routine. “Traditionally that precedes an arrest. You want, you can have a copy of the discovery on Larry Witt and Matt Witt. Read it yourself.”

  “You want to tell me about it?”

  Art Drysdale, his old mentor, the man who had hired him back to the DA’s office a year before, said, “I’d like to, Diz, but it’s not my case. I don’t know much about it.”

  Baloney. Art Drysdale knew the nuts and bolts of every case of any import that got charged, especially any murder case. “It’s Dean Powell’s case. You know where his office is, don’t you?”

  In other words, bye-bye, and don’t stop back on your way out. You’re on the other side now. See you around.

  Hardy decided he would rather not talk to Dean Powell, not yet. Instead, he went upstairs to homicide, hoping to run into Sergeant Inspector Abe Glitsky. Hardy and Abe had started out together as policemen walking a beat. While Hardy had gone on to law school, then to the DA’s office, Abe had progressed through the SFPD for almost ten years until he made it to homicide, the place he called home. If Drysdale no longer was any kind of inside source, Hardy had no doubts about Abe, who was sitting at his desk, looking down at some papers and chewing ice out of a cup.

  Hardy walked through the open room of the Homicide Detail, poured himself a cup of old coffee, pulled up a chair and waited. After a moment or so, he sipped loudly. Abe looked up. Then back down with no change of expression. “The element of surprise,” he said, “in the right hands, can be a powerful weapon.”

  Hardy sipped again, more loudly than before. Glitsky raised his head and chewed some ice with his mouth open. One of the homicide detectives walked by behind Hardy and stopped. “I’d give it to Glitsky on points,” he said. “Those are real attractive sounds.”

  Hardy swallowed his coffee and brought the file up, laying it on the desk. “What do you know about Jennifer Witt?”

  After a last look down at the papers in front of him, Abe closed the folder. “I wasn’t doing anything.”

  Hardy smiled. “You’ve told me many times that nothing
you do when you’re in the office is important, isn’t that a fact?”

  Glitsky ran a finger around his expressive mouth, caressed the scar that ran top-to-bottom between his lips. “I like the way you say ‘isn’t that a fact?’ instead of ‘isn’t that true?’ like the rest of humanity would. It’s very law-yerlike. Witt isn’t my collar. You representing her? Of course you are,” Abe answered himself.

  “Not completely true.”

  “Forty percent true?”

  Hardy pretended to be thinking about the answer. “She’s David Freeman’s but he’s in court. He asked me to go make her feel better.”

  “Which, of course, you did.”

  Hardy shrugged. “It’s a modest talent.”

  Glitsky seemed to want to follow it up, find out how his friend got even this much involved with this particular client, but he resisted the temptation. He’d no doubt get it sometime. He took the folder from his desk and flipped some pages. “Terrell made the arrest.” He craned his neck, checking the room. “Terrell here?” he called out.

  “Who’s Terrell? Do I know him?”

  “OFO,” somebody answered.

  “OFO?”

  “Secret police code, which I’m not allowed to reveal under penalty of death.” He leaned forward, whispering. “Out fucking off.” He went back to the report. “You’ve seen Terrell around. White guy, brown hair, mustache.”

  “Oh yeah, him. When I was at school, there was a guy like that.”

  Glitsky himself was half-Jewish, half-African-American. He stood six feet some, weighed two hundred something and had blue eyes surrounded by a light brown face.

  “Terrell’s okay,” Glitsky said.

  “But . . . ?”

  “I didn’t say anything. I said he was okay.”

  “I heard a ‘but.’ ”

  Abe chewed more ice, then spoke quietly. “If God’s in the details, Wally and God aren’t that close.” He leaned back, spoke in a more conversational tone. “He’s a big picture guy, only here in homicide, what, a year? Gets an idea, a theory, a vision—I don’t know—but it seems to keep him running.”

  “Isn’t that what all you guys do?”

  “No. What most of us do is talk to people, collect evidence, maybe some picture starts to form. Wally’s a little heavy into motive, and motive only takes you so far. I mean, any victim worth a second look, there’s five people with motive to have done him. Wally finds a couple of motives and starts digging around them rather than the other way round.”

  “So why’s he still here?”

  “He’s been lucky. Twice he’s hauled in perps with nothing—Frank wrote him up a reprimand, the second one was so sloppy—and both times, guess what, it turns out he was right. So what are you gonna do, bust him? It’ll catch up to him.”

  Hardy tapped the file. “It might have here.”

  Abe glanced down, turned a few pages, shook his head. “Doubt it,” he said. “Jennifer Witt was righteously arrested. See here? Police reports, witnesses, physical evidence. Plus, as you might have noticed, the public has been introduced to her. She seems like a swell person.”

  “I thought it might be helpful to talk to Terrell.”

  Glitsky raised an eyebrow. “I don’t know if you remember, but if you’re in a defense mode, my colleagues here won’t tend to view you as an ally.”

  “Maybe you could vouch for me—you know, character, judgment, taste, generally refined nature. Sometimes everything doesn’t make it to the file.”

  “You shock me.” Closing the file, he pushed it back across the desk. “I’ll see what I can do, but as always—”

  Hardy beat him to it. “Don’t hold my breath.”

  Glitsky nodded. “Words of sublime wisdom,” he said.

  Although Hardy was not yet legally entitled to it, Art Drysdale had done Hardy the favor of arranging for him to pick up the discovery on the Witt murders, which was basically a copy of the DA’s file on the case.

  Drysdale, it turned out, had been half-wrong and half-right when he said that Jennifer Witt had left out a few tiny things. Right about leaving out some things, wrong about them being tiny.

  They included the testimony of an eyewitness, Anthony Alvarez, a retired fireman with a drawerful of decorations. Sixty-four years old, he lived with his invalid wife directly across the street from the Witts and had heard two shots. If there had only been one, he might have thought it was a backfire and not even bothered to look. As it was, he didn’t really suspect shots even after he heard them—it had been more of a curiosity, that kind of noise. He’d gone to the window and seen Jennifer Witt in front of the gate to her house, looking back toward her door. His initial thought was that she had stopped, was wondering about the noises herself. She stayed there a couple of seconds, then began running.

  There was another witness, the next-door neighbor, Mrs. Barbieto, who’d also heard the shots and had been the one who had called the police. Larry and Jennifer Witt had been fighting for weeks, she said. Their son was an unhappy little thing. He cried all the time. The night before, that morning, “You should have heard them on Christmas” (three days before)—it seemed they nearly ruined the Barbietos’ family dinner.

  Hardy was taking a shotgun approach to his first reading of the file, and had turned right away to the tab marked “Civilian Witnesses.” Apparently there were eyewitnesses. From a defense point of view, eyewitnesses were not particularly heartening.

  He was sitting on the side of the steps outside the Hall of Justice at 7th and Bryant. The day was cool and sunny with a light breeze that would probably kick into a gale by five o’clock. Now, though, it was pleasant, even with the bus exhaust and the fast-food wrappers beginning to swirl on the steps.

  He turned back to the arresting officer’s report. Inspector Terrell had begun to suspect Jennifer after she had provided him with an inventory of items that might have been missing from her home and had omitted the murder weapon. She had carefully searched the house and reported nothing missing. This was before their gun had been found in the Dumpster.

  After that, Terrell had questioned Jennifer about this oversight and Jennifer had said she must have simply overlooked it, blocked it somehow. Hardy didn’t remember this fact from any of the news reports, and it wasn’t a good one to find now. He closed the file.

  “Hardy.”

  He squinted up into the sun and stood up. A tall man, slightly older than Hardy himself, hovered over him in a light charcoal suit, his hand extended.

  Hardy stood and took the hand.

  “Just saw you sitting here, Diz. Rumor has it you’re defending Jennifer Witt.”

  “You know rumors, Dean. They never get it quite right.” He explained his stand-in status, helping out his landlord, the famous defense attorney David Freeman.

  Dean Powell showed a mouthful of teeth. He had a glorious mane of white hair, ruddy skin and an impressive posture. Hardy hadn’t wanted to go see Powell earlier and didn’t feel particularly prepared to chat with him now. But here he was, smiling and talking.

  “Art wanted to warn me early that you had the case. So I’d take it more seriously.” Some more teeth to flavor the compliment. “But it’s Freeman, huh?” His face clouded briefly. Powell might be nice to Hardy and stroke him about what a good job he’d do, but the mention of Freeman moved things up a big notch. Freeman didn’t lose too often.

  Powell motioned downward. “That her file?”

  Hardy patted it. “It seems a little thin on motive for Matt’s death—the boy’s. I mentioned it to Art and he didn’t seem to want to talk about it.”

  Powell’s grin faded. “I’ll talk to you about it. The motive was the husband’s money. The boy got in the way. Period.”

  Hardy turned sideways out of the sun’s glare. “You really believe that?”

  “Do I really believe it? Tell you what, I think it’s inherently believable.”

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  The Assistant DA ran his hand through
the flowing hair. “Do I personally think she shot her boy in cold blood? To tell you the truth, I don’t know. We’ve charged women with that particular crime four times in the last two years, so don’t tell me it’s just too heinous to even imagine a woman could do that.”

  Hardy persisted. “I’m saying she, Jennifer, didn’t do it. I just spent some time with her upstairs.”

  “She was sad, was she?” Powell shook his head. “Remember Wanda Hayes, Diz?” He was referring to a highly publicized case from several months earlier. Hardy nodded, he remembered. “Well, Wanda was a real wreck, crying all the time. And she admitted that she killed two of her kids. She said she just kind of lost her temper one day, felt real sad about it.”

  “Okay, Dean, but—”

  “But nothing, Diz. I’m not saying that Jennifer’s plan was to kill her son. What she did do, and what we can prove, was that she planned to kill her husband and didn’t take the time or whatever else to make sure her son was out of the way. Maybe she was just careless. I don’t know and I don’t care. The bottom line is the son’s dead and she’s going down for him, too.”

  The flash of anger spent, Powell suddenly exhaled, as though surprised at his show of emotion. He reined himself in. “Listen,” he said, “I’m just on my way over to Lou’s. You feel like a drink?”

  Lou’s was Lou the Greek’s, the local watering hole for the cops and the DAs.

  Hardy motioned to the file again, shaking his head. “Another time.”

  The Assistant DA’s face tightened. Powell was said to be considering a run for State Attorney General in this year’s special election and he had obviously been working on his public moves—this invitation for a drink had the ring of sincerity, for example—but it put Hardy on guard. Powell was saying that, as Hardy knew, one of the duties of the prosecutor was to provide full and free disclosure to the defense team. “You know, you might want to drop by Art’s again. We don’t want you to have any surprises.”

  Hardy squinted, moved to the side. This was unusual. “I just got the file an hour ago.”

  “Yes, well, Art and I discussed the case after you stopped by and we decided it would be better to lay it all out at the beginning. Like I said, we don’t want any surprises.”